In The Light Of War
by MyImaginationReeks
Summary: Just a war story about 2 guys in a trench and how horrible things can get.


**In the Light of War**  
By Adrian Romagnano

"What nightmares keep you up at night? What disturbs you so much?"  
"I can't say." He replied.  
"We share the same terrors my friend. The night is naught safe for you as it is for me. We're assigned rest breaks but none of us can truly take em'. It's not our fatigue which is unmanageable. It's our fear."  
Felcom looked up at his friend. His friend stood with his back to the trench and took a long drag from his cigarette.  
"I smell your dreams lad. They smell like the piss of nightmares, not the cheeky smells of a boy lusting his lover." He joked, but only partially. There was truth to his words. He did smell Felcom's piss soaked uniform whenever the boy was forced to sleep by his sleep tally finally getting the better of him. Many of them did. It was acceptable under the circumstances. The fear was that real, and so, they made themselves comfortable with it.

Smoke filled the space between them like a silence between two musical notes. The smell of it briefly dispersed the stench of war but at the same time added to it. Burned machine oils and spent ammunition. Piss, shit and blood. Occasionally the dairy smell of regurgitated rations. It was ironic that the hardest smell to stomach in the trenches was the stench of the insides of another mans. But that's war.

Authors had sometimes written about the dust of war. It's true. As goliath sized war machines traversed the planes, tales of their feats told of the churned earth they carved up in their wake. It was enough to choke a soldier. Sometimes even kill him if he were to become consumed by it. He would he divulged by the very earth he stepped on. The very earth he fought on… Or for.  
Trenches were different though. They were wet and dank. The dust was more settled. Not as fine.  
It was more mould and spores than fine particles.  
Where the earth would open up and consume a man as it was bombarded by ballistic missiles on an open front, in a trench its gaping jaws were held open by men who dug into its gums and made its ridges, hollows and walls their homes for war. They fought in the belly of the earth.  
Clothes were hard to dry and impossible to clean as were guns and ammunition. Most of the men spent at least a portion of their rest time cleaning their auto guns; just in case the next onslaught came. In the night however, or during their slumber, it had been recorded that some men suffered so bad from the fatigue of trench warfare that when the enemy did come to dispense death unto them, they didn't even bother waking up and greet it. Preferring instead to go in the peace of sleep, leaving those unlucky enough to be awake to fight and die with the screams of pain wrought onto them by their nightmares.

The smoke billowed around Felcom's face. They all knew second-hand smoke was even worse for them than those infernal cancer sticks some of the veteran soldiers smoked but in the face of death they didn't care. Today, tomorrow, fifty years from now. Sooner or later death would catch up with them. All of them. None could escape it. Save the Emperor, and then, who even knew anymore?

Felcom coughed. His friend laughed, recognising that Felcom's cough was caused by his smoke. His friends name was Deric. Deric was a veteran from Mordant Prime. He'd been a sergeant in the Mordant Acid Dogs for going on 5 years. He had no ambition to climb the ranks, perfectly satisfied with his place in the hierarchy. He loved his men. He loved the ground. He loved the fighting and he loved the war. He was born at the perfect time in history he thought. The times suited him. Not many could flourish in them as he did. Deric's war stories were boastful, but honest and many of the Mordant Acid Dogs 303rd were surprised he was still alive to tell them. Deric was a solid man, about 40 years old. His face was rugged and worn with black stubble and dirty, short black hair. The right side of his face and all down his neck was scarred tissue. A wound he had received on a campaign to destroy a Dark Mechanicum uprising during his time as a tunnel rat had seen that side of his face barely miss the full blunt of a las round. That was the life of the Mordant 303rd. Tunnel rats.  
Deric took a deep breath.  
"At least we have the air." He said to Felcom as he expelled a large puff of smoke.  
"True." Replied Felcom.  
They were used to the tunnels and whilst a trench wasn't their first preference it was good enough. A nice change they thought. They were from a dirty world. They wanted a place like home. What they got was Galgamus Secundus.

Galgamus Secundus was the second planet in the Galgamus system. A nocturnal world with no natural light. Too far from a sun, its heavy molten core was superheated millennia ago before it was knocked out of its orbit along with the rest of the Galgamus system. Somehow, unknown to the men at the trench level, the core retained its heat and through magnetic fields and a plethora of science unknown to Felcom or Deric, the planet was habitable. All be it, barely.  
"It's almost like home." Remarked Deric.  
Felcom didn't know 'home'. Not really. He wasn't sure where home was for him. He was picked up somewhere by the 303rd when he was a baby and somehow raised by the unit. He was never actually made to fight. That was, until now.

Felcom had been trained all his life his debut into war but nothing truly prepared him for it. Not even Deric's embellished tales of heroics and gore. Deric always tried to make it tougher than it sounded to prepare Felcom. Felcom was the pride of the 303rd and Deric and the men who had kept him safe going on 14 years now had high hopes for him. It was good luck to have Felcom in the trench they thought. They had something, someone to protect. Something more than some generals glory mission that he wouldn't even be fighting. Something of their own. Something for them, not the Imperium. Felcom resembled a future for them. He was them. Felcom was a symbol of life in 303rd and Deric was a symbol of a life lived in it.  
Felcom had short, light hair. It was a disadvantage to him in the tunnels which the 303rd fought in as black lights would instantly give him away. He would usually cover it with some kind of fabric mask or hood but in the trenches, he needn't have worried about that. The only light across no mans land were made from exploding shells and tracer fire. Occasionally there were flares and search lights but primarily lights in the trenches were from bon fires in empty fuel barrels, personal torches or small spotlights. During a bombardment it would all be dowsed or turned off so the enemy couldn't pinpoint their position. It gave he 303rd a pasty skin tone and yellow eyes with dark rings beneath them.

"No man's land." They still called it that. How long had it been? 19, something. Deric was once told the origins of the term 'No Man's land' but now it eluded him. Not important but to know it cast his intelligence above many in the 303rd.

An explosion a few hundred metres in front of the trench momentarily broke the melancholic atmosphere. Deric turned his head. The cigarette still in his hand. Felcom stretched his neck out to see if he could peer over the trench wall trying to get a location of the hit.  
"Don't worry. One of ours." Said Deric.  
Felcom nodded.  
There was another.  
"I didn't know we had munitions." Said Felcom.  
"Usually we don't." Said Deric. "But this bloody planet calls for special measures."  
Suddenly there was an almighty guttural roar across the planes.  
It came sounded as though it came from the pits of a beast's guts and filled the toxic clouds as if it had been roared by as thunder by them itself. One of the other recruits squirmed in his place and hugged his knees.  
Deric turned to Felcom.  
"The wake in the night." He said.  
"That which we can't speak." Said Felcom as he looked Deric straight in the eye. They were both scared but dared not say it. Felcom, petrified.  
Deric butted out his cigarette, trying to look unbothered and took up a place next to Felcom.  
"Has anyone ever told you where the name 'Mordant Acid Dogs 303rd' comes from?" He asked.  
"No they haven't." Admitted Felcom.  
"Well." Said Deric. "Haven't you ever wondered what ever happened to the rest of the units after the 289th?"  
"Now that you mention it…"  
"Noisy bloody music." Said Deric, not allowing Felcom's last word to gather enough space to think of a possible reply.  
"What?" Said Felcom.  
"Somewhere, way back in the 21st century, some of the less desirables from Old Terra used to listen to this music called 'Acid.' Acid was played on an electronic instrument called a TB-303. Now, these bloody ancients were clever right. When their crims and gangers set across the stars some shining git managed to take some of this 'Acid' music to Mordant Prime with him. Well. As you could imagine it suited our boys right to the bone. The lads would get liquored and smoked and listen to this stuff in the safety of the tunnels and so, the 303rd was allocated to the purest of the Mordant Acid Dogs. We're the most-bloody hardcore unit in this whole fudging army!"  
"I didn't know that." Said Felcom.  
"Is that why we celebr—"  
Deric cut him off.  
"Exactly!" He winked as more rounds bombarded the land in front of them.  
"Still ours." He said with a cheeky grin, though the roars continued and were getting louder. They weren't machine. Nor were they man or animal. They knew what they were but again, they dared not speak it. That was, until Felcom finally did.  
He stated the obvious and with it broke down a wall between the two soldier friends.  
"Tonight, we're going to have to fight them head on. Aren't we?" He said.  
Deric nodded. He couldn't bring himself to say yes so, he just nodded.  
A steady vibration hummed in the earth beneath them. Everyone in the trench was preparing for the inevitable which none of the men were able to talk about. They never spoke it.  
They didn't want to give a name to these bastard horrors that had scared the shit out of them since they landed on this ghastly planet. The Mordant Acid Dogs had a pride and ego that was tarnished by fear. They were tunnel rats. They ventured into the guts of a world and disembowelled it from within. They were proud because in tales from Old Terra, a place called 'Hell' was reserved for those spaces deep beneath the surface and those places were the territory reserved for Acid Dog fighting.  
Hell, they were told, was a place where the worst of the worst would be sent after death as punishment for their evil deeds in life. Or so the ancient Terrans before the Emperor had believed. The Mordant Acid Dog 303rd took a sense of pride in knowing that their duty was to travel to those depths and wipe out the lords of evil which dwelled there. To extinguish the horrors of the ancient Terrans. But here, on Galgamus Secundus, they were partially exposed. They were almost in the open. They didn't have a roof over their head and so they were vulnerable from above. Though a welcome change, it made them feel armour less or naked in the field. They always had one more place to watch. The skies.  
In the trenches they could see the enemy from a distance if they looked over the wall. It frightened them. They had time to fear their opponent from this distance and their opponent was truly worthy of striking fear into even the hardest of men.

It wasn't long before the bombardment had stopped.  
"That'll be us done then." Said Deric.  
Felcom sighed. He dreaded what was to come next.  
In the silence after the bombardment, the air was filled with the mighty roars again. But there were more now. There was an army of them.  
"Oh." Said Deric. "They must be in bloody stereo now. Woopty doo. How bloody fancy."  
It was a pathetic attempt to talk down the threat. He had hoped it would make Felcom less afraid.  
It did make him smile slightly. It was more a smile for the attempt. Not the contents, but, that was enough for now.  
The earth beneath them trembled harder. They loaded their auto weapons, knowing full well they would be useless against this foe. Deric shook his head.  
"Fudge it." He said and drew his battle blade. A long, well weighted machete. Felcom had a look of confusion on his face.  
"Let's be honest." Said Deric. "Our rounds won't do shit to them."  
Felcom looked down in knowing agreement and with that, they prepared to meet their fates.

Something hard and heavy slammed into the back wall of the trench. It pulverised the heads of three soldiers standing behind one another. Their bodies slumped over as a red vapour mist filled the space where their heads had been. Felcom looked at his clothes in shock as he patted off a chunk of brain matter with a skull fragment stuck through it. He wondered if the skull fragment and brain matter had even come from the same person. How could one munition cause so much damage?  
Deric grabbed him.  
"On your feet boy!" He picked him up by the scruff and pulled him… Where?  
Just like a tunnel, trenches lacked space. Another thundering explosion pounded into the back of the trench.  
"What the fu—!" Felcom was screaming. He tried to move anywhere the explosions weren't. His screams were drowned out by the racket. Here now was the dust from the old war sagas! Not as fine particles. Not as waves of desert sand or pulverised dry wall, but as large clumps of land and timber and gore particles. As chunks of arms and legs and brains and spines and particles of shit and blood and the contents of someone's last dinner. Mud. There was so much of it you couldn't tell it apart from the shit. And the shit. There was so much of it you couldn't tell it apart from the mud.  
The smell was burned off by the fire storm erupting around them.

The sagas never spoke about those smells. They never spoke of those dust trials. They never glorified the trench wars the same way as they did wars on open fronts.  
Trench wars were for the dirty. They were the places were lives were used as cannon fodder. There was no tactic in trench wars. Just attrition. It was rare that a commander or general won an award for strategy in trench wars. Trench wars were the ones people would rather forget. Trench wars were the ones which earned you medals for less glorious deeds. They were the wars the sagas would rather forget but still had an unfortunate duty to remember. There were too many lives lost for the sagas to remember in trench wars. Every hero in a trench war, was just a number.

The rounds were everywhere. As Felcom narrowly missed another one that eviscerated a soldier he hadn't known, he gasped. The impact had knocked the air out of him and on the sharp inhale when he gathered himself, he had to stop from vomiting. He gagged and dry reached as the eviscerated head mist of the fallen soldier filled his mouth during that sharp breath. He spat a heavy wad of blood. He couldn't even tell if it was his.  
He was dazed. Confused. He looked over to Deric.  
Deric was frantically gesturing something, pointing to his mouth. He finally shook his head and put his re-breather on and pointed to it. Felcom understood and tried to do the same but was met with another burst round that knocked him to his knees. He stayed down and Deric followed him to the ground. The two crawled on their bellies through the trench as scores of their comrades were turned instantly into memories and blood stains.  
There was a new sound amidst the explosions. Familiar but not welcomed. It was the familiar mechanical sound of engines. Light engines. Similar to a vehicle but, not.  
"Chain weapons!" Said Deric.  
"Chain weapons? That means…"  
"DIG!" Said Deric and with his bare hands started removing the soil beneath him. More explosions ravaged the trench It had collapsed in some parts but remained remarkably well preserved in others given the level of punishment it was under.  
The men were desperate. Some went over the top only to come running back when they saw what awaited them. Some shot themselves when they finally saw what was waiting over the wall and on the horizon. It was mayhem. Carnage. As they dug Felcom managed to sneak a peak over the lip of the trench. Deric was right! Chain weapons. Normally the Mordant 303rd laughed in the face of chain weapons. At close range it wasn't too difficult to jam them in a wall and make them in- operational. Not this time. Instantly he recognised his enemy possessed far more skill with any weapon than he or any of his men would ever know. And so, he continued to dig.  
Digging in a trench felt stupid.  
"It was dumb." Thought Felcom, thinking that maybe Deric knew something he didn't. Knew there was no way to escape this death and so for one last time wanted to feel his place in the world. The tunnels.

When Felcom peered over the trench again he saw what he could only know as doom. There was no way a roar so loud could come from so far… And so few. There was only twenty of them. Maybe? He couldn't be precise from that distance. Twenty of them so magnificently horrifying that Felcom lost control of himself. The salty smell of urine filled his rebreather. Deric's too. Deric didn't say anything. This was no time to be questioning the lad's interpretation of bravery. The twenty beings loomed over the horizon. Their shapes were the silhouette of legend. Astartes. Felcom recognised it instantly but where the Astartes were the saviours of mankind these ones were clearly their doom. These were Space Marines who had lost their way. Space Marines who had turned their gaze to the corruption of Chaos. Their helmets had horns and their pauldrons spikes. Chains flung off the shapes of their bodies and in a momentary squint Felcom wasn't sure if one of them had a bevy of heads dangling from the chains adorned to his armour. Deric grabbed him and shook him back to reality.  
"DIG!" His words were muffled in the rebreather. Where were they digging to? Why? Felcom had no idea but he trusted Deric. If it was the last time he would see his old friend, the least he could do was accommodate his insanity in the face of the horrors bounding over no man's land.  
"Deric we're in a trench, not a tunnel. We can't tunnel our way out of this."  
"Just fudging dig!" He screamed back. There was sobbing in his voice. Felcom thought he could see fluid in Deric's goggles. Tears? Maybe. It was understandable but for the honour of his friend, it was the 'fog of war.'

Felcom's knuckles were bloody. The backdrop behind him was awash with reds and oranges of fire and explosions. The trench smelled like a cross between a battlefield, a carnivorous barbeque and a disposal tank for the colostomy bags of un-regulated servitors. Burning human meat was everywhere. It literally fell from and as Felcom was digging along-side Deric, a slither of a comrades charred skin floated down in front of his eyes like a feather falling from heaven. He watched it for a moment as it began to settle, then set back to the task at hand with renewed urgency.

The chained weapons were getting louder. He ventured another peer over the trench wall and saw that the husked Astartes were running now. Their chain weapons were more visible now. Their roars were even louder than their weapons. Their bolt guns still blazed, slamming self-propelled round after self-propelled round into the trench.  
Two of them had chain swords. One wielded two chain axes. The one with the heads dangling from his chains wasn't wearing a helmet. His face was exposed but still too far for Felcom to make out any details. Thankfully. (For now.)  
Others had started digging too now. They followed Deric's lead and didn't ask questions, but they were too late. Had they started when Deric and Felcom had then maybe they'd of had a chance.  
"What's your plan Deric?" Asked a soldier.  
The soldiers name was Baris. A gorky kid, maybe eight years older than Felcom with a long nose and long dark hair.  
"We're gonna dig and we're gonna fudgin' hide!" Said Deric.  
"Hide?" Said Baris.  
"Mate we're the Mordant Acid Dogs 303rd. We don't hide!"  
"Speak for yourself!" Said Felcom.  
"Felcom… Are you gonna hide with this coward?"  
Felcom and Deric looked at each other, then kept digging.  
"Cowards!"  
Baris grabbed his auto rifle and fired some shots over the top of the trench. One, two.  
"Come and get me you bas—"  
He couldn't finish the words. He was paralysed with fear and in his paralysis a bolt round took his head off. It would have been an easy target for this enemy. It slammed into the bottom half of his neck and collar bone leaving his torso a headless rag doll of sputtering arteries. Like when a balloon is filled with water that gushes out from the opening. Baris' body wobbled and sagged to the ground as he painted the sky in arterial red.  
Felcom looked on in shock.  
"No time for that now!" Said Deric as he forced Felcom to keep digging.

They had dug a space in the floor of the trench now where they could lay. They began to cover themselves with dirt and mud, but it was too late. The bounding horde of Chaos Space Marines was at the trench. Their auto rounds were useless. They ricocheted off the Astartes power armour like spit wads hitting a tank. Two of them were wearing different armour. Terminator armour. Although, Felcom wouldn't have known to call it that.  
Those two didn't carry chain weapons. Instead they had great big power mauls fitted with jagged edge power blades and combi bolters in their other hands. They stood on the cusp of the trench and poured bolter rounds on top of the Acid Dogs. There was no room to hide. Their roars turned to laughter as they butchered the 303rd. No. Butchery is too kind a word.  
It wasn't even a slaughter. It went beyond genocide into outright frantic madness. A madness of violence which the human psyche couldn't possibly comprehend.

The floor was thick with blood. The soil red. It was only in the light of the hyper violence could they see their foe. In that violence they could finally see the nightmares that kept them awake.  
One of the hulking giants stopped firing his combi bolter and stepped down into the trench. He was helmetless. His face had scars and stitches all across it. His tongue was long and forked. He couldn't keep it in his mouth. It had teeth growing out of it. Randomly studded across his tongue, long sharp fangs grew which could tear throw an opponent like a chain blade with a lick. Two small horns, more round than sharp grew out of the left side of his neck and although he was heavily mutated, his facial expression was unmistakable. He would relish this kill.  
The gulping of this monster was loud. Almost purposefully. The two bumps on his neck moved up and down as he gulped the blood of a bifurcated corpse laying in the trench. Satisfied, he raised his combi gun and roared as droplets both drizzled down his neck and erupted into the sky at the same time with his bellow.  
Before his arm was even down he had bifurcated another four soldiers with one swoop of his weapon. Their attempted attack had been hopeless. Heroic in the face of hopelessness but hopeless none the less.  
Felcom could only watch from afar. They hadn't reached so far down the trench yet that they were on his position. He was happy that Deric had managed to buy them a few more moments of life with his plan but there was no escaping this. 

In a heart beat the other Space Marines were in the trench.  
The one with two chain axes cleaved his way through the Mordant 303rd, spinning in circles and then stopping to extend his muscled arms like wings before running through the narrow trench, taking its full width in his arm and weapon span. There was no escape. As he ran, skimming the lip of the trench, anyone in front of him was chewed alive, headfirst by the whirling teeth of his chain axes. Anyone who tried to duck was crushed underfoot and anyone who tried to go over the top was instantly gunned down or grabbed by the ankles and smashed headfirst into the walls or ground or anything solid like human baseball bats smashing through a window. Their bones shattered and splintered into those getting decimated by the marine with the two chain axes.  
"Down!" Said Deric as he lay in the tunnel.  
As the rampaging marine came running down the trench, they hugged the earth in their tiny tunnel.  
Safety. They had been missed.  
The space marine turned around. Clearly, he intended to do the same again… Just in case he'd missed anyone.  
This time as he ran back towards Deric's position and with a daring thrust Deric took his machete and lunged it up wards into the Chaos Space Marine. There was no way it would pierce the ceramite of Astartes battle plate. Deric wasn't trying to, although somewhere in his soul he knew he stupidly was. Stupidly hoping to. It was his last hope.  
He had stabbed upwards towards the groin. A weak spot not only for battle armour. Traditionally it had been a weak spot on all males of any species since the first man walked the planet. Astartes were once men, even if they had turned to Chaos, even with all their new strengths they still had weak spots, the same as any man. The marine stopped. If there was any pain, he showed no sign of it. Deric looked at him. He said nothing, he did nothing. He was pulled from the tunnel, headfirst… And crushed in the palms of the mighty marine.  
As Deric's head exploded in the grip of the twin chain axed space marine, it voiced its satisfaction with the revenge it had issued to Deric for the afront caused. With a loud, deep moan, he dropped Deric's lifeless body.  
Felcom froze. His eyes were fixed on the Astartes. He couldn't even blink.  
He didn't realise that the sound scape had changed, until…

More chain weapons roared. The Astartes turned around and Felcom looked passed him. The screams of his comrades were silent. He was the last one. Who then were the space marines lashing with bursts of melta fire in the trench?  
The roars of the traitor marines had changed too. They seemed more, enraged. Some even sounded, painful.  
The traitor Astartes with the two twin chain axes continued to turn his focus away from Felcom.  
Before he could acknowledge what was happening a chain blade penetrated out of the back of the traitor marine, almost taking Felcom's face off as it presented itself through the enemy's torso.  
It chewed and ground through the traitor marine and as he went slack, the teeth spat his organs to the ground. The chain sword was pulled back through the traitor marine. He fell to the ground, narrowly missing Felcom. When his view was no longer blocked by the traitor marines falling body, Felcom saw another space marine. Friend or foe, he couldn't tell.  
Where the attackers wore red, this one wore black armour. Black armour ablaze with fire and decorated with skulls but somehow majestic rather than evil. Almost holy. But a dark holiness.  
The newcomer looked at Felcom and said nothing then turned and joined his battle brothers. As Felcom watched the blazing marine re join the fight he took in the scene. Melta blasts were pouring into the trench in huge pools of flame, melting the traitor marines' flesh to charred flakes of soot and ash.  
For a moment, Felcom wondered if this was hell. Had he gone back in time? Had the stress and fear of war made him hallucinate? Was he watching something of legend in his mind or in his eye? He could no longer tell if this was real and so, he watched on.  
They fought with chain swords and bolt guns. The two Terminator armoured traitor marines stood firm. They were the last two of the twenty standing. Felcom counted twenty-five of the newcomers in black armour but eleven had fallen to the traitor marines.  
A bolt round slammed into the head of the unhelmeted one who had called the charge. His head exploded into a black mist with an almost oil like consistency. All humanity had gone from its being. Vanished. Even its blood was tainted. The toothed tongue fell to the floor and Felcom looked at it. He considered picking it up. He bent down but then the tongue began to flail and move.  
"It was still alive!" He thought and so he shot it with his auto gun until it stopped moving.  
When he looked back up to the battle, the bodies of the 11 fallen space marines were starting to evaporate. Where were they going? How were they going? One more traitor marine stood. A terminator with elephant styled tusks coming from his helmet. He fired randomly at the remaining space marines doing battle. It was unclear if he did this as a final stand, knowing he couldn't win or if blind rage still possessed him, fuelling an ongoing need to kill, even with the odds stacked against it.  
Three of them fired on him with bolt rounds and as he stammered back and forth another of the newcomers leapt out of nowhere, smashing the helmet open with a mighty slash of his chain sword. The impact cracked the helmet and derailed the chain from the chain sword, blunting the blades and sending a reverberation up the mysterious space marine's arm. He dropped the sword instantly and punched his fingers into the gap his blow had just created, prying the rest of the helmet apart with his fingers. He'd exposed the face. A weak spot!  
As his brothers kept pumping bolt rounds into the back of the terminator the one who had smashed his helmet with the chain sword jumped out of the way as a plasma round from nowhere hit the terminator traitor marine head on, burning through its face.  
It all happened so fast. Felcom didn't have a chance to register any features of the final traitor marines face but as it fell to the ground, he could smell the plasma burn and the searing of the warp corrupted flesh. Nerve endings dangled in the hole made by plasma shot and wet chunks separated from it. Felcom looked up.  
He was alone. Corpses lay all around him. His small tunnel was filled with blood and the trench was ankle deep in gore. Twenty traitor marines. Red armoured.  
"There should be 11 more." He thought. Countless of his dead comrades lay in pieces at his feet,  
but there was no sign of the miracle that had saved him. He couldn't account for what had happened. He was all alone.

Silence fell over the trench. No more bombardments. No more enemies. No more light. As the last glow of the final fire of the fighting faded into darkness Felcom saw the scene before him vanish into darkness and wondered, "Will I ever be able to rest again?"

The End 


End file.
